I hate the fact that when I shuffle, the shows end up in any old order. I could have S8E2 right before S1E1. Not cool.
So I made one that shuffles shows but maintains episode order between them, and takes number of episodes in each show into account to get an even spread so the playlist feels the same throughout. If a show has a ton of episodes it will show up more. Less shows up less. All my testing resulted in the top of the list looking almost identical to the bottom of the list. Mission accomplished.
It works by deploying symlinks to a playlist folder, all named 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Slap all those symlinks in the VLC playlist and you got yourself a TV channel.
I made it for me, so it's designed for a specific file layout. It could be easily adapted to fit other organization methods.
I have plans to expand on it. I want to add functionality to detect multi-part episodes and keep them together, as well as some kind of "too many of one show in a row" feature.
Way back in the day, before the current trend towards throwing all your MP3s in a pile and using id3 tags to hopefully sort it out, I had my MP3s in a directory structure by rough genre and album. I wrote myself a shuffler that would honor the directory structure; it would tend to stay in the same directory and use a record of the most recently played songs to avoid repeats, and only jump out if it needed to, or with some relatively smaller probability. Then there was a relatively smaller probability it would continue jumping up through the directories.
The idea is, if you have a multi-genre collection, you may want a "shuffle" but it can be jarring to whiplash between the various genres on every single song as a fully random shuffle would do. So shuffles would tend to honor albums, then honor genre, so that there was a small chance you might flip from techno to classical, and if you did, it would tend to stay in classical for a while, before flipping to pop music or whatever.
I do sort of miss it and sort of simulate it nowadays by just being a bit heavyhandedly intentional about the playlists I make for the day.
It was pretty janky the last time I tried it last year though. When it worked, it was awesome, but when things didn't work quite correctly (or at all), it was frustrating and difficult to figure out how to fix.
Might have to be both, like a new simulate TV mode.
My ideal setup would be channels generated by shows in a random order like this. But I don't actually want my hard drives constantly spinning and Plex playing to nobody, which is what the channels seem to do. It would just track time and when you tune in, then it actually streams to you.
Mix in some commercials from 20+ years ago between shows optionally.
(not an endorsement, I just found it digging around.)
